Blogging is stupid

An Epiphany is when you're walking to 7-Eleven for a snack and you suddenly realize that the universe is just a big number. It's also when you realize that the romantic relationship you're in can never lead to happiness, all while taking a shower before going to work.

An epiphany comes when it wants to and can't be forced. It feeds on randomness and opportunity and on the chance experiences that happen only when you're not expecting them to. Epiphanies can't be scheduled with an AJAX-sexified calendar and don't respect concentration, motivation, or booze.

I've tried all four and I'm the worse for it.

There was a time when I was in love with the radio, and had a blank tape cassette in the boom box all the time. When I heard opening notes I liked the sound of I'd squeeze my fingers down on "Play" and "Record", and if I didn't like the song after a minute I'd stop and rewind the tape and wait for another. I lived in England for the first fourteen years of my life, and my favourite radio station was called "Southern Sound". Their format was no format. They played pop, modern rock, classic rock, jazz, blues, and golden oldies, which is a bit like "Mix" stations play in the United States, but--excuse my cultural prejudice--with a few megahertz of extra emotional bandwidth.

You can, in fact, find such airplay in America if you live in a university town and that university has a radio station. New things became abundant after I learned this and began listening. One is that the best things you hear don't come when you're ready to hear them, and the contact between you and the human being beind the turntables is incredible. It's 11pm and the lights are out. You're in bed with headphones on. The conversation is unidirectional. But the feeling is like tuning into a secret channel broadcast by an alien civilization a billion years ago across an un-navigable expanse of space, its signals only just reaching you now. It's you alone with history. The DJ is a guy alone in a messy studio, and the discs are made of real vinyl.

An Epiphany is when you're busted, and you realize all that's between you and the next rent check is your own brain and muscle. It's also when you discover that you're only worth what you know, and others are learning fast, and you're teaching them. It's nothing to write a poem about, it happens to a million souls a year, but it's personal to the ones it happens to. It comes when it's ready to come. It's the kind of understanding that's only available to the ones which the universe has deemed ready. It doesn't wake you up at exactly 7:30 in the morning. It doesn't deliver itself to your mailbox every Monday afternoon.

I think Epiphanies are like the songs played on a free radio station, and the kind of station I'm talking about are the ones which have been set free. We can experience the same explosive ideas that milliions of other souls have, we just don't know when. It's whenever the distant DJ decides to play it. He doesn't take requests, and he doesn't consult a playlist. What you get to hear and what you get to think are decided by other factors that are not in your control. When those factors are up to the whim of the djins and the muses is when Quality begins.

I once wrote essays once a week. I compelled myself to generate something new every Monday night, clean it up and publish it on Tuesday. I started around the year 2000. A year earlier I was doing it sporadically, its evidence now only in the Wayback Machine. Every Monday I tried to have an epiphany, and sometimes I succeeded.

My best work only happened when something else happened, and after a few years like this I was feeling like most of what I wrote was crap, and embarassing to me, so I stopped, and I reckoned that it was just because I was busy with a new job and a new life. The truth is that real ideas only came to me once in a while, and the initial cruise was all a matter of purging what I'd accumilated over many years.

My true pace--my true rate of creativity--was slower than I said it was, and so I had to burn out. This is nothing to write poems about, it's just a fact of life. But it doesn't mean your brain is deficient. It doesn't mean you're a lesser person. It isn't a sign of old age. It's a bit more romantic than that.

I had an epiphany in 2003 when I was walking to 7-Eleven for a snack. I realized that everything exists all at once, all at the same time. In so many words that sounds like the set-up for a wishy-washy, hippy, metaphysical inner-exploratory boatload of crap, but pretend it's a physicist saying that at a press conference with camera flashes and a podium stuffed with microphones; pretend you've had the feeling you get when you turned on the TV one morning and saw that history was happening.

You're alone, at night, with all the lights out. You're in bed with headphones on, and you're listening to a DJ on a remote radio station. That station is on the campus of a university, and it's been paid for by men and women who came to learn and came to live the best years of their youth. The guy playing records is a student, or a guy from downtown that lives in a low-rent flat, and he's playing the discs he wants to play instead of the ones an advertiser thinks will make you buy toothpaste. A wind rattles the windows. A dog is tied up outside and you just about hear his misery. History has just happened that morning. The whole world is preoccupied with yet another upheval, yet another recycled crisis. But you have just had an Epiphany. It's 11pm. Get the fuck out of bed and write it down.

last updated 3 years ago #